At least 10 Florida counties have identified possibly fraudulent voter registration forms turned in by a firm working for the state's Republican Party, election officials said today.

Problems first emerged earlier this week in Palm Beach County with forms turned in by Strategic Allied Consulting, which the Republican National Committee paid $3.1 million to register voters in Florida and six other swing states. Palm Beach prosecutors are examining 106 voter registration forms submitted by one Strategic Allied Consulting worker, some with apparently forged signatures.

Thursday, the RNC severed its ties to the Virginia firm and filed a voter-fraud complaint.

Florida GOP spokesman Brian Burgess told the Associated Press today, "We are doing what we can to find out how broad the scope is."

The Los Angeles Times reports that Florida election officials have identified suspicious voter registrations turned in by the state GOP in nine other counties -- Lee, Bay, Clay, Santa Rosa, Escambia, Okaloosa, Pasco, Miami-Dade and Duval.

Santa Rosa County elections officials found 100 problematic forms out of about 400 turned in by the state Republican Party. Most did not include Social Security numbers. Others had date of births that did not match the names. Some listed fake house numbers.

"It was that flagrant," elections supervisor Ann W. Bodenstein told the paper. "In no way did they look genuine."

"Anyone with any sense would have known there was something wrong," she said. "Most were changes in current registrations filed in the names of real voters, but signatures were spelled differently than the applicants' names."

Vicki Davis, president of the Florida State Association of Supervisors of Elections, told the Times the the number of suspicious applications was unusual.

"There might be an occasional one, but I don't think we've ever had this number of counties that have had this number of cases all at the same time," she said.

Strategic Allied Consulting was also paid to work in Nevada, Colorado, North Carolina and Virginia. Republican officials in Ohio and Wisconsin had not yet paid the company money the RNC gave them for Strategic Allied's services.

The company is run by an Arizona-based conservative, Nathan Sproul, a former head of the state GOP. The Times writes that he "has been dogged by charges in the past that his employees destroyed Democratic registrations. No charges were ever filed."

In an interview Thursday, the Times writes, he told the paper that the Palm Beach problems were the result of one individual and that his firm had offered to help elections officials in other counties identify problems.

The Florida Democratic Party wants election officials to "revoke" the state GOP's ability to register voters. The deadline is Oct. 9 for the Nov. 6 election.

The university said in a statement that it "will not consider allowing the fraternity to reorganize at UT until spring, 2015. The university reserves the right to extend the suspension as deemed appropriate."

Early last Saturday, Alexander Broughton was brought to the university medical center with a blood alcohol level of .448, more than five times the legal limit, says the station, which owned by Gannett, USA TODAY's parent. Police believe he and other fraternity members were given alcohol "enemas," in which rubber tubing is inserted into the rectum to bypass the liver and speed the effects of booze. Photos showed the frat house littered with boxes of wine, trash and blood.

Broughton and his family have denied the "enema" claims, however, says WBIR, aka 10News.

Broughton's father, Mark, told 10News that his son's medical records show his son's liver was "fried," proving to him that his son drank the wine rather than ingested it via an enema.

Mark Broughton said the wine was all consumed during a game of "Tour de Franzia," a wine-chugging game also noted in the police report. During that game, players pass around the bags from boxes of wine and chug the alcohol, seeing who can finish first without vomiting.

Both Broughton's father and the police report note that Xander Broughton won the game that night.

Mark Broughton also told 10News that fraternity members are gathering signed affidavits to dispute the information that has been released. Those affidavits reportedly deny that the alcohol enemas took place on the night in question or ever.

Based on Broughton's injuries when he arrived at the hospital, campus police initially believed he had been sexually assaulted.

An Arizona carjacking suspect shot himself in the head as Fox News broadcast the end of a police chase west of Phoenix. Fox anchor Shep Smith apologized, saying, "We really messed up."

Update at 7:49 p.m. ET: The suspect stole the car at gunpoint from a couple outside a Phoenix restaurant just before 11 a.m. local time, Sgt. Tommy Thompson, a Phoenix police spokesman, tells AP.

When police located the car, he said, the suspect fired several shots that hit the police car, but officers were not hurt. The suspect headed west on Interstate 10, with speeds hitting 110mph, before pulling onto a dirt road about 70 to 80 miles from the California line. "He got out of the car and shot himself," Thompson said. "Efforts to revive him were not successful and he was dead at the scene. We don't have an ID yet."

Update at 6:22 p.m. ET: Phoenix police finally confirm the suspect died at the scene, the Associated Press reports.

Update at 6:12 p.m. ET: KSAZ-TV, aka Fox 10 News, says the suspect shot himself at 12:31 p.m. PT (3:31 p.m. ET). It writes that it covered the chase until 12:28 p.m. PT, "when it went off the air. However, some of you may have seen the conclusion of the live feed on Fox News, or streaming on myfoxphoenix.com, and for that we apologize."

"We took every precaution to avoid any such live incident by putting the helicopter pictures on a five second delay," he said. "Unfortunately, this mistake was the result of a severe human error and we apologize for what viewers ultimately saw on the screen."

KSAZ-TV, the Fox affiliate in Phoenix, was providing the live feed from its helicopter but did not show the suspect shooting himself.

Update at 4:54 p.m. ET: Fox affiliate KSAZ-TV reports that the suspect's body is still lying in the field where he fell. Police still have not confirmed that he is dead.

The fragment does not prove that Jesus was married or that if he was that it was to Mary Magdalene, according to her draft paper on text.

A Vatican newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano, raised strong doubts about the find in an article Thursday by leading Coptic scholar Alberto Camplani and an accompanying editorial by the newspaper's editor, Giovanni Maria Vian, an expert in early Christianity.

Vian said there were plenty of grounds to dismiss the item as "inept forgery" and "in any case, a fake."

"They both cited concerns expressed by other scholars about the fragment's authenticity and the fact that it was purchased on the market without a known archaeological provenance," the Associated Press reports.

The issue came to a head after Heath Lara, a sergeant at the state's oldest prison in Huntsville, was fired for violating a "non-fraternization" policy by having an inmate, convicted murderer Gary Wayne Sanders, as a Facebook friend.

Sanders is serving 72 years for a 1990 Fort Worth killing, the newspaper says.

Lara insisted he didn't know that Sanders was a Huntsville prisoner, only that he was a high school acquaintance.

Perhaps more important, an internal investigation also found that a number of other prison employees had Sanders as an online friend, including the director of finance for the Texas Department of criminal Justice.

There was also no evidence of any correspondence between the two men nor any security concerns.

"With more than a million people in Texas now incarcerated, on parole or probation, there's a pretty good chance some of those Facebook friends are or have been in the criminal justice system at one time," Lance Lowry, president of a Huntsville local of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, which represents prison guards, tells the newspaper.

The American-Statesman says three other corrections workers had been terminated or disciplined in the past year for similar "friending" violations.

The dead included company founder Reuven Rahamim, who founded the small company, Accent Signage Systems, which makes interior signs for companies and industries.

The gunman died of a self-inflicted gunshot in the company's basement.

Update at 8:03 p.m. ET: Authorities have identified the remaining three people who were killed.

The are company employees Rami Cooks, 62, of Minnetonka; Jacob Beneke, 34, of Maple Grove, and Ronald Edberg, 58, of Brooklyn Center. Cooks died today in the hospital, while the other four were killed at the scene. Some were shot in the head, and some were shot more than once, the Star-Tribune says, citing the Hennepin County Medical Examiner.

Update at 5:23 p.m. ET: Police say a fifth victim has died, raising the death toll to six, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune says. The person has not yet been identified.

Besides the 61-year-old Rahamim, United Parcel Service driver Keith Basinski, 50, of Spring Lake Park, was also killed. The names of the other fatalities and one of the wounded have not been released.

Accent's director of operations, John Souter, was upgraded from critical condition to serious, a Hennepin County Medical Center spokeswoman said. Production manager Eric Rivers was in critical condition.

Police Chief Tom Dolan said that the gunman, 36-year-old Andrew Engeldinger, apparently spared some employees. A search of his home found another gun and ammunition packaging for 10,000 rounds. The victims were shot with a Glock 9mm semiautomatic pistol.

Engeldinger's family released a statement today, saying he struggled with mental illness for years and had lost contact with the family, the paper writes. "This is not an excuse for his actions, but sadly, may be a partial explanation," said the statement, which expressed sympathy to the families of the dead and wounded.

Update at 2:21 p.m. ET:The Minneapolis Star-Tribune reports that the suspected shooter has been identified as Andrew Engeldinger, 36, of Minneapolis. The newspaper says Engeldinger had apparently lost his job recently at the company.

The authorities have identified a second person among the dead, 50-year-old UPS driver Keith Basinski

Buckingham, who lives feet from the business, tells KARE-TV that she used to work at the sign company as a receptionist and knows the victims and the shooter. She did not witness the shooting but is in contact with current employees who did.

Although police did not confirm, she says the gunman was an employee at the business and was laid off Thursday, KARE reports.

KMSP-TV FOX9 reports that the shooter, who has not been officially identified, arrived at the company offices in the Bryn Mawr neighborhood of Minneapolis late Thursday after being terminated from his job that morning. FOX9 quotes unidentified police as saying the gunman "may have been targeting specific employees."

The Minneapolis Star-Tribune says police told a local resident that the shooter was apparently a disgruntled employee.

Dozens of police squad cars and SWAT officers swarmed the residential neighborhood on the city's north side after an employee called 911 around 4:30 p.m. to say shots had been fired, the Associated Press reports.

Police were able to get people out of the building but did not exchange shots with the gunman.

"Very sad situation in Bryn Mawr," Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak writes in a post on Twitter. "Please stay away and let the police do their work."

The Star-Tribune quotes a high school student, Marques Jones, as saying he was about a quarter of a mile away when he heard around five gunshots.

"They were loud," he tells the newspaper. "Loud enough to make you jump. We froze and (then) just ran for our cars."

According to the company's Facebook page, Accent , which employs about 30 people, started as a part-time engraving business out of Rahamim's basement in 1984, KARE-TV reports.

Canadian authorities say two police constables helped smuggle more than $200,000 worth of cheaper U.S. cheeses and other foods across the border from Buffalo to sell to pizzerias and restaurants.

The Niagara Regional Police Service announced today that the pair, one of whom has been fired, were arrested and charged, along with a third man. Charges against the three, all from Fort Erie, Ontario, include smuggling and other customs violations.

Constables Scott Heron, 39, and Casey Langelaan, 48, were suspended in June amid the investigation. Langelaan was subsequently fired.

The "large-scale" cheese-smuggling operation emerged from the April arrest of another NRPS constable in Buffalo on charges of trying to smuggle more than $1 million in anabolic steroids and other drugs into Canada, the CBC reported earlier this week.

The police service says "the network" bought cases of cheese and foods on the U.S. side of the border, then drove them into Canada without declaring the goods or paying duty. The products were then sold at discounts to pizza parlors and other restaurants in southern Ontario, netting the smugglers a profit of about $165,000.

Dairy regulations and import controls on U.S. products can mean Canadian cheese costs up to three times more than across the Niagara River.

A Canadian border agency spokeswoman told the BBC that only $20 worth or 44 pounds of dairy products can be brought into Canada duty free.

He was ordered not to own or use devices with access to the Web without approval from his probation officer -â?? and any approved computers were to be used for work only. "Defendant shall not access a computer for any other purpose," according to the terms of his probation.

There were also restrictions placed on him in enlisting others to get on the Internet for him. Some speculated that Nakoula may have violated those terms after the film trailer was loaded onto YouTube, although it is unclear what exactly prompted the recent arrest.

Nakoula had been arrested in 2009 after federal agents searched his home in Cerritos, Calif., on suspicion that he had engaged in a scheme to create fake identities and open credit cards in those names, then draw tens of thousands of dollars from the phony accounts.

According to the court file, Nakoula operated under a dizzying array of aliases, including Kritbag Difrat. In June 2010, he was convicted on four counts, including bank fraud and identity theft, and was sentenced to 21 months in federal prison. He was also ordered to pay $794,700.57 in restitution.

He was released, according to federal records, in June 2011.

Original post:Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, the alleged producer of an anti-Islamic film that sparked violent anti-U.S. protests, has been taken into custody and will make an initial court appearance this afternoon in Los Angeles, USA TODAY's William Welch reports.

Thom Mrozek, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney's office, says 55-year-old Nakola, a Coptic Christian, was arrested for alleged probation violation for his conviction of bank fraud in 2010. A bail hearing was to be held sometime after 3 p.m. PT (6 p.m. ET).

Federal investigators had been looking into whether Nakola violated terms of his probation agreement by uploading the controversial film, Innocence of Muslims, onto the Internet and YouTube. As part of his sentence he was banned from using computers or the Internet, or using false identities.

Federal probation officers interviewed him Sept. 15 but did not arrest him. The next day he said he would not return to his home after receiving threats when he was linked to the film, which Muslims have called an insult to their prophet Mohammed. He has not been charged with any crime relating to the making of the film.

A purported Renoir painting bought for $7 at a West Virginia flea market two years ago was actually stolen from the Baltimore Museum of Art six decades ago, The Washington Post has discovered.

Saturday's eagerly awaited auction of the Impressionist work, Paysage Bords de Seine (Landscape on the Banks of the Seine), has been canceled, and the FBI is investigating.

The oil painting was done on a linen napkin, allegedly for Renoir's mistress. Searching the museum's library, the Post found documents showing it had the artwork from 1937 until at least 1949. After being alerted today, museum officials found paperwork indicating the painting was stolen from the Renoir gallery on Nov. 17, 1951.

The Post explains who found it and what happened next:

The Virginia woman, who wants to remain anonymous, bought the painting in 2010 for $7 in a box with a doll and a plastic cow. She said in an interview that she stashed the box away for nearly two years before her mother suggested it might be a real Renoir.

Shortly after the woman brought the painting to the auction house in July, Potomack checked with the London-based Art Loss Register, the world's largest private database of stolen and lost art, and verified that the Renoir wasn't suspicious. Potomack said it also confirmed the piece's authenticity with the Paris-based Bernheim-Jeune gallery, which sold the painting to the May family in 1926 and keeps a registry detailing the ownership histories behind Renoir pieces.

But neither Bernheim-Jeune nor Potomack could explain what happened to the painting after 1926 or how it came to be sitting in a box of junk at Harpers Ferry Flea Market on Route 340. Until Thursday, the Baltimore Museum of Art, which has an entire wing named after May, said it had no records of the Renoir ever being exhibited there.

The painting was bought from a Paris gallery in 1926 by Saidie A. May, a prominent Baltimore resident who loaned the piece to the museum. It vanished six months after she died, just as her collection was being bequeathed to the museum.

A Los Angeles-area chef who admitted killing his wife and cooking her body for four days was convicted of second-degree murder.

David Viens, 49, of Lomita had been charged with first-degree premeditated murder of his 39-year-old wife, Dawn, but the jury settled on the lesser charge after about 5½ hours of deliberations over three days, the Associated Press says. Sentencing is set for Nov. 27. He could face 15 years to life in prison.

Dawn Viens vanished in October 2009, and her body has never been found. In February 2011, Viens told his new girlfriend and his daughter that Dawn Viens' death was an accident, then jumped off an 80-foot-high Pacific Ocean cliff at Rancho Palos Verdes after learning he was being investigated.

Hospitalized with multiple broken bones, Viens told detectives in March 2011 that he suspected his wife had stolen money from his restaurant, Thyme Contemporary Cafe, and they had an argument. He said he bound his wife's mouth, hands and feet with duct tape, something he said he had done previously because he "didn't want her driving around wasted, whacked out on coke and drinking," CBS Los Angeles recounts. He said he then went to bed, waking up four hours later to find her dead.

He described in chilling detail how he disposed of her body: "I just slowly cooked it, and I ended up cooking her for four days," according to a recording of the interrogation played in court. Thinking no one would believe the death an accident, he said he packed her body into a 55-gallon drum and slowly cooked it. He poured the rendered remains down his restaurant's grease trap, threw other parts into the trash and hid her skull in his mother's attic. Police never found the skull or other remains.

As an alibi, he told Dawn Viens' family and friends that she had left him. Weeks later, he began dating a waitress at the restaurant.

Viens, who attended the two-week trial in a wheelchair, showed no emotion when the verdict was read. Dawn Viens' sister burst into tears.

About Doug Stanglin

Doug is an unrepentant news junkie who loves breaking news and has been known to watch C-SPAN even on vacation. He has covered a wide range of domestic and international news stories, from prison riots in Oklahoma to the Moscow coup against Mikhail Gorbachev. Doug previously served as foreign editor at USA TODAY. More about Doug

About Michael Winter

Michael Winter has been a daily contributor to On Deadline since its debut in January 2006. His journalism career began in the prehistoric Ink Era, and he was an early adapter at the dawn of the Digital Age. His varied experience includes editing at the San Jose Mercury News and The Philadelphia Inquirer.